34 comments:

itdifin 960As I previously mentioned, Neilson Powless in his 3rd or 4th race of the year, after representing the US in Europe on the World Mountain Biking Team, is beginning to get back into shape. He will be one of the top 10...or even 5 by State meet. This kid will be going places!!

I'm working on combining all the races (yup 15,000 times) as we speal and should have something up later tonight or tomorrow morn. If someone wants to take the excel file that has both days in it and send me that file with teams CIF divisions in it, then I can compute out standings by division. Same is true by Section (Walt has already sent me the CCS athletes and I'll be posting that soon) but if someone wants to do the other sections, please do and I can create a NorCal list.

Very true Albert, but you still got to add a couple of seconds to the Mt. Sac times to make an actual comparison with Crystal. I don't necessarily agree with both time converters offered here. Crystal is still a tougher course in my opinion.

St. Joe's had an outstandin race and deserve not only a spot but a higher NorCal rankings. They also bested Flintridge 39-72 in the D5 Sweepstakes race which could very well be preview of the upcoming D5 State championship. Glad to see Chris Melendez back from injury.

Here are 4 kids to add from our school... When we were there we had lots of kids missing from results... they said they would try to fix things but with the size of the meet probably not going to happen... BoysFreddy Torres 16:28Owen Ibarra 16:55Jeremy Samples 17:22GirlsElisa Ibarra 21:01

My watch was right-on with the finish line clock for our school's race. The official, published results vary from 2-to-5 seconds slower for every runner that I clocked - our school as well as others. No way they can fix that for this year...

One possible reason for that is the pad that records the chip timing was placed beyond the finish line. If a runner stopped right at the finish line and then proceeded slowly forward,their time was recorded only when they went over the pad.

Thanks to Anon 12:57 who posted that their watch and finish video matched up. Runners for our team also were missing and randomly 2-5 seconds off from what we had and I was wondering where the difference was (finish line clock or the official results). Also to note regarding name changes despite changes made with the timer none were made in the results.

First year with chip timing, hopefully they learned from their mistakes.

I watched the finish line videos posted on dyestat for a few of the races and you can see that the finish clock and posted time do not match. It looked to me as if maybe the times were recorded off the second pad that the runners crossed. Just a guess.

To all those stating that Mt. SAC wouldn't fix errors, they did for us (Amador Valley). There was a problem solving tent on site and we brought our concerns to them. We only had 2 athletes not show up in the results. We brought the bib numbers over, gave them our names and estimated times and they said they'd review the tape. They told us right then and there that it might take them a couple of days to fix, which seemed reasonable given the task and that they had 55 more races to run that day. Our errors were fixed last night and we moved from 5th in our race to third. It was worth the wait. As for the times being off by 2-5 seconds, They made announcements throughout the day that the actual finish line was beyond they arch at the top of the hill and that athletes needed to run through the pads on the ground. We had at least one runner lose a couple of spots due to stopping early, but that was not Mt. SAC's fault. I hate to be the apologist, but it seems to me that effective chip timing is a step towards the lightning fast and efficient results we all want and Mt. SAC is trying to move toward that goal. There will be some hiccups in that process and as long as they're going to work to fix them, we'll probably all be pretty happy that they went through this process in a couple of years. Also, all of our names were changed in the results.

Our results were just updated last night also for race 9 adding our missing top 3 guys...http://events.mtsac.edu/ccinvite/results/2013/hs/9.pdfI'm sure many races are being fixed as we speak since a few more missing kids of ours are still missing...Not sure how much it will change things but I do think it's much better to wait and post results once they are correct since hundreds of running sites take results as they come and post and have a hard time updating them later...I do like the chip timing but if it's going to be a problem with missing kids then old school tags may work better in the end, especially for championship events where much is on the line...Coach IbarraNMC

Some teams ran late in the day and did not hear announcements throughout the day. The timing discrepancy added 19 seconds to our 1-5 team time; the division team course record is only 12 seconds less... so it mattered at the margin. Would have been better to highlight finish line changes in the packets to make sure the runners all understood.

I agree that the chip timing at Mt. Sac is a huge step forward. Let's hope they work out the kinks for the future.

Hank,Haha! I still have Popsicle sticks! I guess if it's not broke why try to fix it ;)I know the wave of the future is upon us and having chips in the bibs is very cool! Iron out the kinks and I'm sure we will all love them! For now I'm not loving it... we've been to 3 meets with chips and all 3 have missed many of our kids in the results...what's the plan for CCS and State? Anyone know?Gus

I can only speak for how Sean does races, he runs two sets of systems (for redundancy), first set of pads are the official time, 2nd set is to catch a "miss-read" (remember that XC races are only timed to the second, even though he has the time to the tenth). In the event of a close finish, Sean also runs a FinishLynx camera so that he can switch the order of finish (based on torso) if the shoe time puts someone in front of someone else when they shouldn't be). He also runs a program (constantly) that is checking to see if a "read" from pad #1 and a "read" from pad #2 both happened, if not, he can go back to either the FinishLynx OR the IdentiLynx (real time video) camera and insert whatever is needed. So he's got many resources at his fingertips to make sure that the order and times are correct (in big meets, someone else is taking his data and creating the results - in smaller races he waits til everyone is done and then creates the results (I'm not even going to go into the "split" pads that he puts out on the course). It's a VERY COOL thing to watch Sean do what he does, makes my little program that creates results seem small and yet I get the credit for I hand the printed results out to the "poster".

Hank,As a real-world database geek (in financial context) I really appreciate your detailed description, which shows how no automated process can run hands-off and maintain accuracy. There's a constant stream of runners across the finish line, and having all of these cross-checks and ways to correct (with ~Lynx as backup "looking over your shoulder") is absolutely necessary. And we should all appreciate the work of Sean, or anyone in his position.